Rob Pegoraro, Special for USA TODAY 7 a.m. EDT October 13, 2013
Microsoft Corp. retail store employees and guests mingle at a pop-up Microsoft Store during Microsoft's annual meeting of shareholders, in Bellevue, Wash.(Photo: Ted S. Warren, AP)
[h=3]Story Highlights[/h]
Q. Are there any e-mail sites that don't bombard you with ads? I would not mind paying for an e-mail account.
A. In the year and a half since a different reader asked a similar question, several things have changed about the Web-mail market.
Google's Gmail has added a set of automatic filters that try to sweep marketing messages and site-update notices out of your primary inbox and under separate tabs. I generally like them, but I realize not everybody agrees.
Meanwhile, Google has also amped up its presentation of the Gmail ads it automatically places based on software analysis of the text of your messages. They now occupy a more prominent spot on the Gmail site and in Google's just-updated Android app.
Don't like having that much marketing with your mail? At least for now, you can have an ad-free experience using the Gmail Offline app for Google's Chrome browser — already worth using for the ability to read and compose Gmail messages without an Internet connection. You can also set up a standard e-mail program, like Mail for OS X or Outlook for Windows, to synchronize your Gmail to a Mac or PC.
But you can't pay to opt out of Gmail ads entirely. The best you can do is create a separate Google Apps account for $50 a year, then set the Apps account to fetch your Gmail messages.
At Yahoo Mail— refreshed last week with new mobile apps, an updated Web interface and the woefully overdue addition of free downloading or synchronization of your messages to any standard e-mail program— a paid, ad-free option does exist. But it now costs $49.99 a year instead of the $19.99 Yahoo charged before.
Microsoft's Outlook.com, its considerably upgraded replacement for the old Hotmail service, charges only $19.95 a year for an ad-free version. Outlook.com got another boost last month when it finally added standard "IMAP" synchronization— until then, Mac users were stuck using a browser interface or falling back to an older, download-only option called "POP."
(To simplify a discussion that can wind up e-mail wonks, IMAP, short for
Microsoft Corp. retail store employees and guests mingle at a pop-up Microsoft Store during Microsoft's annual meeting of shareholders, in Bellevue, Wash.(Photo: Ted S. Warren, AP)
[h=3]Story Highlights[/h]
- Gmail Offline app lets you read messages without Internet connection
- Ad-free Yahoo Mail costs $49.99 a year
- Tip: Opt out of Google's 'Shared Endorsement' ads, if you want
Q. Are there any e-mail sites that don't bombard you with ads? I would not mind paying for an e-mail account.
A. In the year and a half since a different reader asked a similar question, several things have changed about the Web-mail market.
Google's Gmail has added a set of automatic filters that try to sweep marketing messages and site-update notices out of your primary inbox and under separate tabs. I generally like them, but I realize not everybody agrees.
Meanwhile, Google has also amped up its presentation of the Gmail ads it automatically places based on software analysis of the text of your messages. They now occupy a more prominent spot on the Gmail site and in Google's just-updated Android app.
Don't like having that much marketing with your mail? At least for now, you can have an ad-free experience using the Gmail Offline app for Google's Chrome browser — already worth using for the ability to read and compose Gmail messages without an Internet connection. You can also set up a standard e-mail program, like Mail for OS X or Outlook for Windows, to synchronize your Gmail to a Mac or PC.
But you can't pay to opt out of Gmail ads entirely. The best you can do is create a separate Google Apps account for $50 a year, then set the Apps account to fetch your Gmail messages.
At Yahoo Mail— refreshed last week with new mobile apps, an updated Web interface and the woefully overdue addition of free downloading or synchronization of your messages to any standard e-mail program— a paid, ad-free option does exist. But it now costs $49.99 a year instead of the $19.99 Yahoo charged before.
Microsoft's Outlook.com, its considerably upgraded replacement for the old Hotmail service, charges only $19.95 a year for an ad-free version. Outlook.com got another boost last month when it finally added standard "IMAP" synchronization— until then, Mac users were stuck using a browser interface or falling back to an older, download-only option called "POP."
(To simplify a discussion that can wind up e-mail wonks, IMAP, short for